8 Types of Infographics and How Nonprofits Can Use Them

8 Types of Infographics and How Nonprofits Can Use Them

Infographics are the New Fact Sheets

Share and Share Alike
The business world has gone infographic crazy and we’ve become so enthralled with viewing them. I personally like checking them out from a design perspective and admiring how visually appealing they are, but I’m sure many are wondering – how useful will this be to my nonprofit? I think the best answer to this is simply that people LOVE to SHARE infographics – which can bring you tons of website traffic. And If you think of them as really just modern fact sheets, you can see the possibilities open up.

Show Me the Credibility
Infographics, just like fact sheets, don’t have to be just about showing the results of a study. In a post I did a couple of years ago – Just the Facts Ma’am, Using Fact Sheets to Promote Your Nonprofit – I talked about how fact sheets can showcase your expertise, building credibility for your nonprofit in whatever specific field you are in. I had identified various types of fact sheets and have now expanded upon the list to highlight 8 types of infographics and how nonprofits can use them. Keep in mind that you can combine 2 or more of any of these types into one infographic depending on how much you want to convey!

The 8 Types

How-to (process oriented)
These take you through a process step-by-step. I found lots of interesting ones like this guide to selecting a college roommate or the one below on the email marketing process. A nonprofit could pull together a step by step process on how to become an advocate for their cause or create a step by step guide on what to do in a particular scenario (like an emergency).

Research Results
These are the ones we see most often that show the results of a study or survey. Nonprofits can create an infographic based on their own internal survey of their constituents or create one jointly with other nonprofits that participated in any broader research.

Compare & Contrast
Showing how something has grown or changed (I love Then vs. Now comparisons like The Internet: A Decade Later) or comparing 2 or more products, ideas, philosophies, programs. Nonprofits could showcase their history and accomplishments/impact (how they’ve grown since they first started), or compare and contrast a new way of doing something that they advocate or have adopted.

Did You Know?
This would just be interesting facts without necessarily reporting on the entire results of any study – either pulling out one component of your own study or gathering data from other people’s research into a unique compilation of information. Many nonprofits have fact sheets related to the people they serve or the issues they face that would make for very interesting infographics.

Demographics
This information is traditionally used when doing market research for a business or campaign of some kind and can be very useful information in general. Nonprofits can profile their client population or the areas they serve to educate donors and constituents.

Advocacy
This includes outlining an issue or problem and then inviting people to help fix it (with a call to action) – designed to educate and cause change like Stop the Texts, Stop the Wrecks and the example below about energy access in developing worlds. Any advocacy campaign that a nonprofit has can be expressed through an infographic.

Timeline
Some of the most interesting infographics are actually timelines that show how a particular brand or social media channel came into being. Nonprofits can show their own history or the history of how an issue or problem started and significant influences along the way. Or if there was a particularly well-known person that had a significant impact in your industry, their life or contributions could be profiled through a timeline.

Tips or demos

These are great for just conveying general information or best practices that would be useful to your target audiences and you’ll often see them start with The Top 5…. I LOVE this marketing calendar one that visually shows the best practices for posting and what a sample weekly posting schedule would look like! Nonprofits can provide tips on the 5 best ways to improve…(child’s reading skills, healthy eating habits, any topic directly helpful to constituents).

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